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Skul: The Hero Slayer
Skul: The Hero Slayer blends solo action with changing maps and skulls you can swap mid-fight. At its current tracked low, it costs $4.69 from 
Eneba, a fitting moment to pick it up if that flexible 2D combat is what you want. Full controller support is included.
Skulls alter range, speed, and power, letting you build combinations around your style. Single-player and a supported English interface make the setup straightforward; this low is a timely option if that focused action appeals to you. At $19.99 from Eneba, Skul offers solo action and quick skull swaps; Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese-Brazil, and Polish names its confirmed interface languages.
GGselSkul: The Hero Slayer РФ+СНГ+ВЕСЬ МИР Steam КЛЮЧCredit/Debit CardAll-time low ~ $9.99across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $5.232026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $4.69EnebaAt its historical low now
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Skul: The Hero Slayer
As a lone skeleton, Skul fights through the ruined Demon King's Castle to rescue its captive ruler. This 2D action platformer pairs roguelite features with changing, challenging maps. Equip up to two skulls, each with distinct range, speed, and power, then switch between them in battle to shape your attacks and play style. Steam players: 93%% positive from 50,902 reviews. Supported interface languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese-Brazil, and Polish. Released January 20, 2021.
Credits
Developer
SOUTHPAW GAMES
Publisher
NEOWIZ
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$5.232026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | — |
Show 8 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | — |
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | Yes | — |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-20
02Before you buy
Play options
The Steam PC version is single-player and has full controller support.
Language
English is among the supported interface languages; listed language support includes subtitles, not full audio.
03Frequently asked questions
What kind of game is Skul?
It is a 2D action platformer with roguelite features and changing maps.
How do skulls work?
You can equip up to two skulls and switch between them in combat; each changes attack range, speed, and power.
What happens at chapter ends?
Each chapter ends with a powerful boss corrupted by Dark Quartz.
8.0
Overall Score
Graphics8.3
Audio8
Gameplay9
Story5.5
Content8.5
“Head-swapping mechanics and build-driven progression power this pixel-art rogue-lite, delivering crisp combo strings and a compelling one-more-run loop for action fans.”
Our Verdict
Skul is the kind of game you find yourself defending the longer you play it — an 8.0 overall. It never reaches the altitude of reshaping its genre, but it polishes every load-bearing part until they assemble into a dependable little machine for unwinding.
Where it sits in the rogue-lite top tier
You will reflexively shelve it next to Dead Cells and Hades, and that instinct is correct. The triangle is also the fastest way to understand it: Dead Cells wins on the elegance of its exploration and weapon feel, Hades wins on narrative density and character, and Skul's differentiating ace is the head-swap — two characters carried at once, swapped on the fly — which is the one thing neither of the others can hand you. Its case is not made in a single opening blow; it eases you into warm water a degree at a time. Fast sidescrolling action, build depth that runs deep enough to keep mining, and the grunt-kills-the-heroes role-flip stack into three pillars holding up a loop that turns very steadily.
The critics agree almost to a word. The Strong tier and top-eleven-percent placing on OpenCritic, the Metacritic 80, the 93 percent Steam rating all point at the same verdict — a high-but-not-perfect work that is full marks on mechanics and merely good on content.
The shortfalls are plain: thin writing, real luck swings, fatigue over a long grind. None of them adds up to "do not buy"; they read more like a spec sheet telling you in advance whether you are the player it is hunting for. Read the sheet honestly and the purchase makes itself.
Who should buy, who should walk, and how to buy
Buy without hesitation if you are this person: you love fast sidescrolling action, you live for random builds and multi-run grind loops, and you can shrug off a little luck variance. If your reference points are Dead Cells or Hades and you are happy to drill a swap-combo until it sings, Skul hands you the role-swapping thrill neither of them offers — and if your budget is tight and you simply want a solid sidescrolling action rogue-lite in the hands, it is close to a blind-buy on value alone.
Walk away just as clearly if you crave a thick long-form story, want fresh events every single run, or lose all interest the moment a loop starts repeating. Skul reserves the whole stage for combat and building; its plot will never satisfy the story crowd, and forcing the purchase only ends in disappointment. As for how to buy — now is the best moment there has ever been. After nearly four years of free updates the base game is the story-complete, content-rich final form; grab the base on a discount and stop there. The paid Mythology Pack is for veterans already in love and hungry for more high-end skulls to tinker with; no newcomer needs to bolt it on from the start. It does one thing exceptionally well and the rest merely passably, but if that one thing is exactly what you came for, it is a machine well worth keeping in the library for the long haul.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
you play as a skeleton.Show moreShow less
37.7 hours at review689 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
I really hate to have to review this one negatively but there are just some issues that make the game too frustrating to recommend. I have a few main concerns, and my first is that too often damage feels frustrating and unavoidable. Not always of course, here and there would be no big deal, but it's fairly frequent. Most of the greatest (IMO, obviously) roguelikes like The Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Hades, Dead Cells, etc, make it feel like MOST, if not ALL damage is avoidable. This creates an incredible feeling of triumph when, as your knowledge and skill with the game progresses, you can avoid all the damage of the earlier mobs, bosses, traps, whatever with ease. Saving that often valuable HP for the stuff you have yet to make it to in a run so you can learn the nuances of those mobs, bosses, traps. Unfortunately with Skul, there are times where 10+ mobs spawn, all of your attacks are shattering background objects, debris flying everywhere, the enemies projectiles are going off, and you come out of the fight feeling good, look down and you've lost 20, 30 health and go "When the hell did that happen? I didn't even think I got hit". It's just SO unsatisfying. The combat feels great, and if this were a typical RPG or something where after a fight you could eat, potion up, what have you, it wouldn't feel as discouraging; However in a roguelike, health is a resource, and when you feel like your resources are getting stolen from you with little input on your part, it sucks. This can make it feel like instead of jumping into a fight, you should hang back and just wait for your cooldowns, pop them on the mobs, and then run away and wait for CDs again. My second main complaint is one I've seen several reviews mentioning before purchasing, and can definitely agree with them now. The same bosses and floor layouts over and over and over gets really tiring. Most of the boss fights are pretty fun, if a little damage spongey and less mechanical, but they're mostly fun. But seeing the exact same ones, in the exact same spots, every run brings it down. And basically the same thing with the floor layouts/enemy spawns. A few hours in and you'll have seen the majority of floor layouts of each stage and that also just feels too repetitive, too soon. And lastly, the RNG/Skull and item imbalance. So, skulls have different rarities, and obviously the higher the rarity, the better the skull (common, rare, unique, legendary). The problem is that the difference between the capabilities of say a rare skull and a legendary skull is truly insane. A legendary skull and no other items can carry you far further than a rare skull and some top tier passives. BUT, they have an upgrade system for lower tier skulls! That sounds awesome! Except it takes a pretty atrocious amount of time garnering enough fragments to upgrade a skull, even if taking every skull drop door option available. So you're basically always just hoping you find a legendary skull, or at least a few unique skulls that you can upgrade a different unique skull into a legendary with. This is not common. In 8 hours of gameplay I've upgraded just two skulls to legendary, and acquired 2 Legendary skulls as drops. Now, something that really saddened me was that there is a passive item cap. You can hold only 9 passive items, along with one activated item, and two skulls. One of my absolute favourite things in roguelikes is when you've collected an arsenal of passives, stacking together in awesome ways that make you feel overpowered! That can make having a crappy weapon, or in this case, pair of skulls, feel much less frustrating, because your other items are helping carry the weight. That just doesn't really happen with Skul. With the 9 item cap, you'll mostly be stacking % damage increases of either magical or physical damage, obviously preferably whichever your skulls deal. But as I said earlier, even if you have awesome passives, and crappy skulls, you just often wont have the tools to get through some of the fights. Anyway, I doubt anyone has really read this far, but I hope you believe me when I say I truly would rather recommend this game, as I feel it is quite close to being known as one of the greats. These issues though I feel are quite glaring, and can heavily hinder your enjoyment of the game. I'm still going to be playing it, but just a run or two here or there before the frustration sets in. Hopefully in the future there may be some changes to address some of my issues and you can guarantee I'll be changing my review once I feel it's warranted. If you pick up the game, I hope you love it!Show moreShow less
8.1 hours at review386 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Full review (including score): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irI7AArncfU Summarized review below! The rundown: Pros: + Solid combat + Really cool skull mechanic + Great gameplay variety and progression + Nice pixel graphics Cons: - Unbalanced items and skulls - Repetitive level design and music Why play the hero when you can play a lowly skeleton on a quest to save the demon king from the humans that kidnapped him? That’s the idea behind Skul, the latest action roguelite to grace Steam. Note: Had to trim review to fit character limit, check video for full version! Pros: Solid combat. The core to any good action roguelite is combat, and that is fortunately something you won’t have to worry about with Skul. Hits offer up ample feedback, the controls are intuitive, and there’s really no sense of clunkiness to it. It’s a very fast-paced game most of the time and there’s nothing like stamina meters to slow you down. This is perhaps best seen in the movement, which is incredibly responsive. Want to cancel that attack and double dash to the side before flying back in with your next attack? No problem. There is so much movement to the combat that I was quite literally zipping around in most of the fights, especially so whenever I had a speed class equipped. However, that is not to understate the game’s difficulty. This is an incredibly difficult game, especially at the start when you have barely any upgrades. Bosses will constantly stomp you, certain room layouts may be a guaranteed half-HP loss, and it can honestly be quite frustrating at times. However, it kept me coming back, even when it felt like I had hit a wall. If anything, that’s a testament to how fun the combat is. Really cool skull mechanic. Alongside core combat, roguelites also need something differentiating each run, to avoid the game feeling repetitious or grindy. Skul may not be perfect here, but it has a solid grasp on this concept. For one, I really liked the dynamic between the “skulls” that you can equip and regular items. The weapons and abilities you have at any given moment are granted by whatever skull you have equipped, and these skulls can be found as room rewards or in shops during each run. They’re basically classes, each revolving around some theme and some really changing the way you play the game. There are dozens to be found and even more so when you consider that most of them can be upgraded a few times to unlock different attacks and abilities. You can have two of these skulls equipped at any given moment, and each has a unique ability that activates when you swap to it. This gives the combat a nice layer of depth to it, as you’re basically encouraged to swap between skulls depending on the situation and I quite liked the dynamic there. Great gameplay variety and progression. The variety doesn’t stop at just the skulls though, the game also has a decently sized enemy roster, some neat bosses, and your standard passive upgrades and stat buffs just like most other action roguelites. One upgrade may simply increase your attack speed while another may summon a familiar every time you attack. These work in combination with your skulls and I discovered some very cool synergies between them, such as the gargoyle skull and an upgrade that caused me to drop bombs every time I double jumped. Because the gargoyle can glide, it registers as multiple double jumps and I pretty much could just carpet bomb entire areas by flying over them. Then there’s the progression, as this is a roguelite and not a straight-up roguelike. It mainly comes in two forms: demons that can be found on the map and jewels earned during a run that can then be spent on permanent stat upgrades. For each demon you bring back to the demon castle, you unlock the ability to start off the run stronger than just your default state. The first demon you unlock, for example, gives you a random skull to start with. The jewels are a bit more long-lasting, as they can grant stuff like permanent damage upgrades and even the ability to revive upon death with a certain amount of HP. Both of these give the game a nice sense of progression. It’s slow progression for sure, but enough that you’re not completely walled off when you feel stuck. Nice pixel graphics. Detailed sprites, colorful backgrounds, cool visual effects, the art has a lot going for it here. The animations in particular were very nicely done, with each class getting its own fair share of animation work. It’s just a good-looking game in general and worked perfectly at 1440p 144 fps without any frame drops, stutters, or other such issues. Cons: Unbalanced items and skulls. Skul may do a lot right with regards to its gameplay variety, but as I played more and more, I couldn’t help but notice there was one big problem. To be specific, it’s that some skulls are clearly superior to others. Now that may sound like a given, but the problem is a bit more deep-rooted than that. Normally, in an action roguelite, you build up this arsenal of upgrades and items that keep stacking and synergizing with each other, changing the way the game is played as you progress. In Skul, it’s not like there is none of that, but your success in a given run is much more reliant on you finding a legendary skull, regardless of what other items and such you may have. So instead of building up an arsenal of cool upgrades and such to synergize with each other, it becomes more of an RNG quest to find those few skulls that can get you through the boss fights. If you don’t find one by the second boss, it’s pretty much a dead run. That is why it took me almost five hours just to get past that second boss. So, as much as I love some of the simpler skulls, they simply don’t compare to something like the Grim Reaper or the Gambler, which can absolutely shred bosses and entire rooms of enemies even without strong items backing them up. It feels great when you finally get one of these skulls, but I feel like the rest could use some balancing so I don’t feel like I’m handicapping myself by using a common skull. Repetitive level design and music. As I said earlier, Skul’s gameplay variety is not perfect and this is best exemplified with its level design. Not even a couple hours into the game, I was already noticing a pattern with both level layouts and enemy placements, enough so that I could enter some rooms and immediately know where to go to get the best damage output as enemies spawned. Then there’s the music, which by itself is not bad (although not great either) but is just so limited that it can become a bit grating. The first area, for example, you’ll run through so many times that that backing song becomes embedded into your brain, that same looping few-minute sequence over and over. Overall: Skul: The Hero Slayer is yet another example as to why I love action roguelites so much. It’s got the solid core combat, the excellent gameplay variety, and some nice pixel graphics to top it all off. It may not be perfect, especially on the grounds of balancing and level design, but it’s a very well-made game all things considered. If you’re a fan of such action roguelites, it is well worth a look. Follow my Steam Curator Page for more reviews + videos!Show moreShow less
16.7 hours at review334 people found this helpful
Received for free
Not recommendedSteam player
The concept is cool, but the action is a mess. You cant see whats the enemies are doing because of hit spark, enemies spawn in crazy quantities and speed, and its a rogue-like that you're supposed to tank a ton of attacks that you'll be unable to dodge. I've managed to beat the final boss one time before the 1.0 release. Didnt feel any sort of accomplishment because of said reasons above. There is no emotion in beating a boss if you are just lucky or tanky. Feels like a Dexter and Mandark slap battle =( Not sure if this game wants to be "its own thing", but maybe could take some concepts from bosses in Hades and Dead Cells, where the fight is way more controlled and rewarding. Fighting 3 mini-bosses at the same time in the lab is the absolute worst feeling. Their moves are not made in a synchronous way that you can avoid consistently anything. Really wanted to enjoy more of this game, but at the moment it feels like it needs some fine tuning. **Edit: Thank you devs for the response! I'm looking forward for next updates. =)Show moreShow less
8.5 hours at review368 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
One of my favorite Rogue Like Games, sadly my comments are never seen. but this is truly a fun game and has the most replayable experience i've ever enjoyed.Show moreShow less
34.4 hours at review271 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Every part of me wanted to enjoy this game, and I forced myself to play well past the point of misery to make sure I'd given it a fair shake. After 20 hours, I'm done. I love roguelikes, roguelites, platformers, 2D souls, metroidvanias, etc. I've played thousands and thousands of hours of these genres of games that can feel very unforgiving and deeply unfair, but Skul blasts past them all in that regard, quickly crushing my initial excitement into stony silence and leaving me seriously baffled at some of its design choices. To start off, the concept is great. Little skeleton hopping around, slashing his way through "heroes" and switching his head out in Skul's version of a class system. The sprites and animations are great, and the character design is coherent and satisfying. Then we get to mechanics. Immediately, this is where things started to sour. Many of the skulls are so awkward as to be unusable without serious practice (and good luck getting it, because you'll often go several runs without seeing certain skulls). Some are just flat out awful, and even a good skull might stall out if you get the wrong skill when you pick it up. Furthermore, some skulls might be awful or godlike depending on the items you find (or don't). There isn't much player control over what items or skulls you get. I'm used to RNG dictating a lot about a run in nearly every roguelike, but in Skul, it feels extreme, like the game just decides whether or not to give you interesting classes or pure trash. Now enter level and enemy design. I truly can't overstate how much these two made this game a "no" for me. At first, things are fairly balanced. Foot soldiers, big guys, archers, a variety of fairly tame trees. Then you get into the second zone, and apparently welcome to hell. Now there will be large, massive spongy enemies that do something hideously annoying, and unless you're rockin' around with huge modifiers, enjoy spamming your paltry attacks against the maids that summon three other maids, the alchemists that you just aren't going to stop from summoning golems, etc. Then you've got the "adventurers" who vary between utterly harmless and unstoppable teleporting juggernaut, and seem to be another way for the game to inform you your run was doomed from the start. Apart from the absolutely wild difference in enemy strength, with some rooms being so sparse and others being packed to the gills with aforementioned hellmaids, the way the game handles level design and healing is dedicated to your suffering. I have on numerous occasions had a nearly flawless run, deftly dodging around and taking my shots carefully, trying to lean into the "Skill over stats" ethos. Then you walk into the next room and there are sixty mages, archers, alchemists, exploding ghosts, spinning traps, and suddenly you're 200 HP down and wondering what else you could be doing with your time, because you definitely won't be healing 200 HP back. Here's your 10 HP blip from killing the archer, ninja and paladin adventurers, sucker. Don't even get me started on the "event" rooms. After testing out a couple, and giving serious consideration to the risk vs reward proposition, I skip every single one of them. I have what we'll call fairly serious disagreements with the reasoning behind whoever put these rooms together. So what's the big deal, right? Sounds like "git gud" time, yes? Well, sure, but now we have the question, "Why should I?" Most roguelikes have upgrades that carry over between runs, and Skul does too. However, the system in place isn't just bland, it's one of the biggest reasons I can't keep going. For starters, the upgrades feel more like you're just missing parts of your character, and you're handicapped until you grind up thousands of quartz so you can start actually playing with a chance. When I die ingloriously in Rogue Legacy, I get to say "Alright, well, let's spend some gold." When I die in BoI, I can say "Alright well, at least I got that clear before dying." Skul I just look sadly at the witch, and consider whether I ought to just stop. The answer was eventually yes. The magic of small incremental upgrades (gotta get them numbers, right dopamine?) fades rapidly in this game, and in no time I was disconnected from the character and had lost any sense of progression. So in short, I wanted to love Skul, but I guess the developers had other ideas.Show moreShow less
21.9 hours at review277 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I actually don't really like this game, as I feel it's unfairly difficult compared to your average rogue like. I still think it's a good game just not for me. What I am mainly here to say is that game runs flawlessly on Steam Deck. It should have a green check mark. No idea why it says it can't run well. It's a 2D pixel platformer lol. Runs and plays fine on Steam Deck.Show moreShow less
3 hours at review250 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game looks beautiful and I really would like to recommend this, but I can feel that after 9 hours I'm starting to get enough because of how repetitive the game is and how the game mechanics and games systems ultimately seem to boil down to memorization and building muscle memory and nothing else. Initially, the game seems super fun. The upgrade system for switching the character class and building synergies with the different items seems very deep and makes your imagination run. But I get the feeling that it is never really utilized well. The game alternates between levels where you kill a huge amount of cannon fodder and then arrive at bosses. The bosses have clear patterns and usually, the fights consist of stages where these patterns remain similar but get faster and more damaging as the fight goes on. The issue is that the character builds and game mechanics that work in a fun way in the cannon fodder levels, such as mixing different status ailments, do not work at all at the bosses. It's like the game discards everything about the mechanics in the boss fights excepts raw damage output and memorizing the patterns. And since you cannot practice the bosses, the game becomes a grind where you either get lucky and get a skull that has insane damage output and that is how you win against the boss or you re-run 30-40 minute runs 20-30 times to slowly build muscle memory against all the pattern and keep dying until you could win the bosses using any character, no matter how weak, because you can avoid most of the damage. In the end, I concluded that nothing else matters in this game other than trying to get lucky and maximizing just raw damage output. Or memorizing the levels and bosses and grinding the game endlessly so you upgrade the permanent upgrades which I assume makes everything easier. But that kinda takes away all of the fun from the game for me and makes all of the complexity and experimentation I thought would be here at the beginning vanish.Show moreShow less
9.2 hours at review208 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
SansShow moreShow less
1.2 hours at review209 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I really wanted to like this game, but at the end of the day I just can't. To its credit, the world it's set in is very charming and very creatively designed, and on paper Skul has a ton of really good ideas. But the one area that quickly lost my interest is the one that matters the most: Gameplay. The entire thing is a slow-moving, tedious, grindy slog from beginning to end (and this is coming from someone who had patience enough to beat Dead Cells on its hardest difficulty). The "randomized" stretches of the levels and the things in them, from enemies to other obstacles to items at the end, get extremely repetitive VERY quickly and basically come down to either "huh, that was a little TOO easy" or "OH GOD, please kill me NOW"; there is NO middle ground. You're either a Shredder-esque menace who encounters no challenge at all until a boss, or a Slim Jim who might as well be poking all of your foes with a dull graphite pencil (and probably breaking it in the process). However, all of that and even the overly grindy process of attaining upgrades that are frankly too small to make ANY significant difference still wasn't quite enough to turn me off to this game. That dishonor belongs to the boss fights. I'll be fair and say that the first two MAJOR bosses aren't that bad (in fact the guard sisters' fight was the one that brought me the closest to having any genuine fun here), but I'm mostly referring to the various random hero mini-bosses. Long story short, none of them are fun. Depending on which one (or ones, as you proceed further) shows up, you're in for a fight that is either boring and not engaging at all, or teeth-grindingly annoying. Special mentions go to the ninja (who is just flat-out the most overpowered enemy in the whole game) and the cleric (if she shows up in the later hero fight where you have to face a three-man squad, you might as well restart the run then and there because even if you somehow win the price you pay will not be worth it at all). No matter which of them it is, though, they ALL have absolutely ungodly-huge health pools, and you can not afford to try getting aggressive with them so you will be forced to dance around with these clowns for a long time. Not to mention in the middle of the fourth stage, the game will pick a random one to chuck at you again and make them even worse. Eventually when the game decided to throw the already unbearable ninja at me there, that's when I decided enough was enough. I dread to think of what even comes after, because that was the one that broke what patience I still had. Too sluggish, too tediously grindy, not enough interesting elements in said grind (or among your rewards), and it has no trouble at all making some extremely tall orders of you as a player. I really, really wanted to like this game, but too many things in it push all the wrong buttons. I just can't.Show moreShow less
8.9 hours at review159 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.